Game theory is a general lexicon that applies to all life forms.

Strategic interaction neatly separates living from nonliving entities and defines life itself. Strategic interaction is the sole concept commonly used in the analysis of living systems that has no counterpart in physics or chemistry.

Game theory provides the conceptual and procedural tools for studying social interaction, including the characteristics of the players, the rules of the game, the informational structure, and the payoffs associated with particular strategic inter­actions. The various behavioral disciplines (economics, psychology, sociology, politics, anthropology, and biology) are currently based on distinct principles and rely on distinct types of data. However, game theory fosters a unified analytic framework available to all the behavioral disciplines. This facilitates cross­disciplinary information exchange that may eventually culminate in a degree of unity within the behavioral sciences now enjoyed only by the natural sciences.... Moreover, because behavioral game-theoretic predictions can be systematically tested, the results can be replicated by different laboratories. This turns social science into true science.

Herbert Gintis, 2009^[585]

Prisoners of Reason argues that neoliberal capitalism and governance reflect a new theoretical rationale that was initially developed and applied to prosecute the Cold War through exercising credible military threats, many of unimagin­ably devastating nuclear destruction. Policy analysts and social scientists came to accept strategic rationality as the epitome of human reasoning, thus render­ing obsolete formerly accepted perspectives on intelligible action. Most promi­nently, in its orthodox operationalized form, strategic rationality only permits agents to pursue outcomes in competition with others over scarce, instrumen­tally salient resources. This book’s primary goal is to render clearly how this

new understanding of rational action sustains neoliberal markets and govern­ment in direct contradiction to classical liberalism.

Noncooperative game theory adopts a stance toward action that accepts actors’ preferences as given; models action choices descriptively, normatively, or prescriptively depending on the context; and seeks solutions or equilibrium outcomes that will obtain assuming that actors maximize expected utility with varying attitudes toward risk. In John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s original articulation, this science of choice claims to be an exhaustive treatment of rationality in all decisions involving more than one individual. Therefore, it offers to agents the imperative to comply with its principles of choice, tacitly linked to survival and success, or to suffer the fate of irrationality and loss. Once this behavioral protocol is accepted, then the alternative logics of action, including principled commitment, shared intention, and joint maximization, as well as gratuitous other-regarding acts of beneficence become unintelligible and are lumped together with irrational conduct such as playing blackjack as though there were ten aces in a standard deck of cards.

Classical liberalism, which refers to the modern-era writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, and extends forward in time to include the more recent texts of Robert Nozick and John Rawls, reflects profound thinking about how to achieve a mutually agreeable and beneficial social order notwithstanding the fact that the social world evinces dissensus and conflict.^[586] Yet these theorists converged on holding that indivi­duals recognize their own and others’ right to corporeal existence, to the property extending their capacity to act in the world, and to the goods and services owed to them through contractually bound exchanges. The no-harm principle, which unites the right to noninterference with the negative virtue or perfect duty to refrain from interfering in others’ right to exist, is the self­approved Archimedean reference point that enables classical liberal society to emerge from anarchy.

Neoliberal political theory invalidates the logics of action-sustaining classical liberalism. The modern classical liberal system of prudential responsibility and allegiance to the duly constituted rule of law acknowledges realms of value above and beyond fungible resources, security of personhood and possession being the most obvious, and the wherewithal to choose manners of conduct that are consistent with living in a civil society, rather than in a perpetual state of nature. Neoliberalism, by contrast, offers as imperative the single logic of strategic action that condones unbounded utility maximization that reflects salient instrumentally obvious fungible rewards, and might produce order if actors manage to converge on a mutual-best-reply equilibrium that easily could be suboptimal. No actor concedes to any other actor his or her fundamental right to exist. Rather, as in offensive neorealism, actors assume that personal survival will probably be at cross-purposes with others’, and that self-defense through the augmentation of one’s resources is a natural imperative. In this world of finite resources that all actors alike seek in competition with one another, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is prominent because every actor prefers to have all the goods, leaving everyone else with none. Unlike in classical liberal­ism, actors fail to respect others’ corporeal persons and their private belongings as an prerogative of personhood and agency. Instead, the neoliberal actor has the foremost preference of securing the highest payoffs possible irrespective of the impact on others and, moreover, views any encounter that could result in exchange as an opportunity to issue credible threats so that in any eventual unstable and precarious cooperative outcome, the other will settle for the least amount possible. Neoliberalism builds order atop what game theorists view to be the fundamental building blocks of order: actors’ unbounded pursuit of expected utility that tracks ontologically present value as a prior condition for establishing patterns of conduct.

Part I examined how game theory was developed to model strategic combat over finite resources and threats of harm with relevance to rational deterrence. The nuclear security dilemma resulted in the logical vindication of the officially declared policy of the United States to prepare to fight and win a nuclear war among superpowers, notwithstanding the fact that mutual assured destruction (MAD) is and has been an inescapable existential condition. Whereas, at first, the weakness of minimum deterrence through MAD had been the incredulity of issuing immoral promises to destroy innocent civilians after deterrence had failed, political theorists’ acceptance of game theory beyond the realm of military strategy, already prefigured in von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, impugned the reasonableness of the institution of moral promising across the board for being inconsistent with strategic rationality.^[587]

Part II explored the contours of neoliberal political theory that differ cate­gorically from classical liberalism in viewing the sovereign’s power of enforce­ment as the necessary and sufficient condition to govern, accepting that the social contract is built up out of coercive instead of normative bargaining, rejecting fair play and commitment in favor of incentives and threats, eviscerat­ing unanimity and consent of motivational significance, and understanding the failure of collective action to be the limiting case of the two-person Prisoner’s Dilemma in which each actor foremost seeks to sucker the other. Neoliberal theory identifies de facto power and possession as individuals’ means to action in the world, excluding express or tacit consent to abide by agreements and rules of conduct they themselves endorse. It accepts that the opening point for negotiation in either dyadic exchange or the social contract is the application of credible threats. It views no agreement to terms as sacrosanct because such agreements are perpetually subject to renegotiation for better terms and will be reneged on whenever it is possible to do so by suckering others with impunity.

It is not astonishing that some agents might view their range of options and the meaning of their actions in these terms. Doubtless throughout history, pure strategic rationality without regard for others has reflected coherent plans of action for some people like Thomas Hobbes’s Foole and David Hume’s knave. However, what is new in neoliberalism and its attendant certification of the gold standard of rational agency codified in orthodox noncooperative game theory is the view that actors have no choice but to embody such rules of engagement as a condition of survival. This view is supported by the branch of research discussed in Part III, “Evolution”: evolutionary game theory.

Part III discusses the role that game theory has played in analyzing evolution. Evolutionary games and replicator dynamics represent a field of game theoretic analysis. Yet it is little known that Richard Dawkins’s bold argument in his “selfish gene” theory was derived from the application of noncooperative game theory to the study of biological evolution. Dawkins himself acknowledges this point. He writes, “I have a hunch that we may come to look back on the invention of the ESS [evolutionary stability strategy] concept as one of the most important advances in evolutionary theory since Darwin.”^[588] The ESS concept is defined using game theory.^[589] Dawkins goes on to observe that “the ESS concept... is applicable wherever we find conflict of interest, and that means almost everywhere.”^[590] In essence, the assumption of unremitting indivi­dualism built into noncooperative game theory resulted in the deduction that selfishness is the necessary character of all living forms. Evolutionary game theorists have not been shy in applying their conclusions to social theory.^[591]

The two chapters in this part honor the burgeoning scholarly effort to determine whether the forces of individually targeted evolutionary natural selection permit the development of other-regarding or altruistic behavior.^[592] Prisoners of Reason concludes by demonstrating how Richard Dawkins and Robert Axelrod have applied the laws of noncooperative game theory to suggest that coherent purposive action on all levels, from subhuman life forms, to individuals, and also to firms and nations, must comply with its dictates or fail to be successful as determined by an external preexisting metric.

Game theory is celebrated as a means to unify the social and behavioral sciences, and it provides a single methodology to distinct levels of organization.^[593] Dawkins, who built analytic models using noncooperative game theory, subse­quently applies the results of these models for making claims about human nature and offering public policy recommendations. Axelrod, who played a significant role in establishing the school of neoliberal international relations theory, applies his argument across the board from evolutionary biology to individuals in society, to nation states navigating anarchy. Both Dawkins and Axelrod place great credence on repeating games to demonstrate that the semblance of cooperation in nature and society can be explained by reciprocal altruism. Their central idea is that agents will cooperate when it is directly in their interest along the Tit for Tat principle of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”